4 ms·
I completely agree. Another major factor the article missed is price.. you can buy a computer for $5 to $4000. Cars at at a much much higher range and therefore
by soared 9y ago
I completely agree. Another major factor the article missed is price.. you can buy a computer for $5 to $4000. Cars at at a much much higher range and therefore consumers have less desire to tinker / potentially break / buy new parts / upgrade / etc.
(Although, I do not know how expensive PCs were back in the day)
- dsr_ 9y agoMachrone's Law held from about 1985 through 2001: "The computer you really want costs $5000."
- ghaff 9y agoAnd it's worth noting that: 1. Those are non-inflation-adjusted dollars, and 2. While Machrone's Law was a reasonably accurate observation, in the early days it was pretty easy to get to that number just by adding a 5MB hard drive to your IBM PC. By later in that stretch, you could still get up to $5K (and probably could today) but that's with configuring almost every state of the art option/add-on you can think of.
- dsr_ 9y agoStart with a top-of-the-line CPU and the nicest available motherboard in a soundproof case. Max the RAM. Add a fancy graphics card, a big fast drive and a pair of giant spinning disks, a big ultra-high-res monitor, and the input devices that you really want. Buy new, brand name, and not on a special sale. Et voila, one $5000 desktop machine. (If you put it together over the course of a year, buying reputable reliable parts on the best sales, it might be a $2500-$3000 machine, yes.)
- emodendroket 9y agoIf anything I think it's the opposite. It's not like you're just going to turn around and buy a new car every couple of weeks.